Invention (in the sense of any independent creative work) is what a company does. Innovation is a judgment of that invention's significance, from a few years out, or the lack thereof.
Unless you're in marketing. In that case, innovation is what WE do (even when ripping off the competition). Copying is what the competition does (even if we have not done that thing yet).
Sony wasn't typical. I was an early Minidisc user, and their interface software was some of the worst. They kept using that we'll into the MP3 era. In fact, early Sony "MP3" players only played ATRAC audio... their interface software did the conversion when you downloaded...one reason you still needed it.
Here's the thing: we're geeks, and so dragging over files we rip seemed a piece of cake. But there are a huge number of computer users who basically use a PC by rote. They know a few recipes for successful computer use, and they fail if any step along the way yields a different result. They fundamentally don't understand files, CDs, or "ripping" as we here do. So to a huge percentage of users, an MP3 player was impossible to use.
Like it not, the iPod was the MP3 player that solved that, by requiring all interactions gated through iTunes. A big headache if you knew what you were doing.. but hey, we all had an MP3 player or two by the time the iPod came along. And Apple's real coup was selling individual tracks directly, then locking you into Apple via their DRM. A regular iTunes buyer could never even consider another device. And yes, DRM also a form of geek repellent. Plus, these days, I just have Google Music automatically sync MP3 between PCs, tablet, and phone. Plugging is so 20th century. But it's handy to have real files for other stuff.
It absolutely can be retroactive.
Th I s patent was filed under the old system. That was first-to-invent, patent is dated from the submission, but it's good for 17 years from the date of grant, and applications are held confidential. Contrast that with the new system, which is first-to-file, expires 20 years from the submission date, regardless of when it was granted. And applications are published.
The new system was designed to prevent working the system to get a legal "submarine" patent. Long ago, some patent holders would hold back on enforcing their patent, wait until it was in common use, then surface it and go after violators. This was eventually made to be grounds for losing the patent. You have to enforce it or lose it.
So clever legal minds started working the system. One could file a known to be faulty patent, and have it kicked back multiple times for clarification, improvement, removal of overly broad claims, etc. You technically can't add new features that way, but you can clarify things. And, of course, stretch out the review process for years. So it's not really a patent year in its submarine years. The new system was designed to prevent this. Work fast, and you get bonus years on the patent, drag, and you lose them.
This guy, Gilbert, was already famous for a fundamental submarine microprocessor patent that wasn't granted until 1990. Some of it was later tossed out, but he's made many millions on that one. Kinda odd that this thing keeps happening to the same guy. Impossible to believe it's happening to him without at least some foot dragging on his part. Though he's claiming it's the PTO out to get him. There's no indication of just why this has taken so long. Was he rejected many times? Is it a final rejection being appealed? Or did the PTO really just disappear the application?
Apple doesn't care about market share, at least up to a point. They never have. They understand that only a certain percentage of the population (about 5%) is willing to spend twice as much for a commodity PC with fewer ports in a pretty case. But as long as they're making 5-8x the per unit profit versus most any other PC company, that's ok. Similarly in mobile... Samsung sells about one in every four cellular devices of any kind, they make the SOC, the flash, the RAM, the display, etc... and it was only last year that they came close to making Apple level profits in the mobile sector.
Apple does have to worry about volume in absolute terms. One unloved model of iPhone or iPad could put a serious hurting on their bottom line. Even that's not a significant risk, given all their cash in the bank. And if they dropped enough in market share to significantly affect software sales, that would be very bad for them. But even with Android hovering around the 80% mark in hardware sales, iTunes still did not quite twice the money of Play in 2013. It would take a very significant other mobile platform, and Apple getting knocked to third place, for any real threat here.
And after all, shareholders are looking for profits. You can't spend installed base alone.
A battle of wits against an unarmed man?
And I do wonder, is this officially to be a scientific debate? So "The Bible", being a religious document and in every way possible not a scientific document, is off limits? Or is the great Mr. Nye getting into an explicit contest of dogma? Suppose I'll have to catch the inevitable YouTube just to see how Nye handles this situation... very weird, to be debating science against a person who rejects any science that doesn't fit his personal mythology.
I don't have any problem with 4K. It looks fantastic. And after I upgrade a camcorder or two to 4K, after the industry speaks on the delivery formats, etc. I will probably buy a 4K television. I upgraded from a 71" DLP to a 70" LCD/LED last Spring, with "passive" stereoscopic display (aka "3D"). It's a great TV... and this kind of illustrates why 4K might not win. After all, I'm one of the few customers who understands this (as are many here, I'm sure) and knows it's something I want and can use. Though I'd probably want 80-85" in my current media room. That'll fit just dandy, but the only 4K model I saw at 85" ran about $25,000.
As in many things, "good enough" is the enemy of excellent. It's been pretty well established that most consumers don't give a damn about better-then-CD quality audio. Both DVD-Audio and SACD failed to deliver anything but niche products and media. No, the format war didn't help. Blu-ray Audio could eventually do better, but mostly by not being anything fundamentally different than regular Blu-ray.. both earlier formats required new players to really deliver the promised improvements. And the simple fact was that most consumers didn't have good enough audio systems for CD. Meanwhile, the lower-than-CD-quality MP3 player took off like nothing else before.
Here's the problem with the TV industry... television had one major change from its introduction until HDTV... it went to color. That didn't force anyone to upgrade, though eventually folks did; tube TVs didn't last forever. And sure, there were tweaks to the technology, but regular consumers didn't know they now had active comb filters or whatever... SDTV was still just SDTV.
Then HDTV came along. Many didn't buy a first generation HDTV, but I did. A big, expensive, 3-CRT back projection model, $4K+ and 600lbs, analog inputs only. Of course, HDTV came along at the same time everyone realized the CRT was leaving us but not settled on the successor. Most of the early-adopter types upgraded from their analog HDTVs to all-digital HDTVs at more or less the same time the general population was upgrading. That's when I got my 71" DLP... it was the winner in a price-performance shootout with a Pioneer Plasma and a Sony LCOS display... your main choices for large screens in 2005-2006. So this second round did great things for the TV makers... rather than get upgrades as the old devices failed, they had people upgrading after 5-7 years. Pretty sweet.
So naturally, they sought to keep that momentum going. What could do that? Stereo! Or as they dubbed it, 3D. Blame "Avatar", maybe, but they model from Samsung one year after my DLP came with a 3D sync output, the idea being support of 3D games, much as folks like nVidia were already playing around with on PCs. Why? That output cost them all of $0.50 to implement (eg, routing a known signal to the outside world, and that price is assuming a buffer). Mature 3DTV was nearly as cheap. The active systems added virtually no cost to the display, some LED or Bluetooth circuit for frame sync, rather than the RCA jack, but not substantial, under $2.00. The glasses were certainly more, but they're getting $100 retail for replacements, and at one point got substantially more for the television. The passive system needs an accurately registered alternate-line circular polarizer, but that's just replacing the usual LCD polarizer, so maybe a little more expensive, but not even an extra part. And the glasses are much the same as the "throw away" RealD glasses you get at the movies... essentially, they're sunglasses. These all commanded a higher profit margin in a very competitive industry (Samsung's sales in CE is about half of their sales in Mobile; the profits in CE are tiny compared to Mobile, and Samsung's the world's largest TV maker). For awhile.. today, the price is settled where CE prices always settle... cheap. 3D is just another expected feature on higher-end TVs, just as Blu-ray has become an expected feature of any DVD player over $50.
So now everyone who might even consider 4K has a fairly newish HDTV they're fairly happy with. There is a Blu-ray committee working on a possible Profile for 4K on Blu-ray, but no news yet. There's HDMI 2.0, what you need for non-insane 4K connections (the current 4K televisions use 2 to 4 individual HDMI connections for 4K input). There's HEVC and BD-XL, in place, depending on which place they'd like to put 4K... or the proprietary eyeIO CODEC, which is claimed to be pretty good for 4K at today's Blu-ray rates, if HEVC can't cut it. So, all the piece in place... for a real introduction, maybe, in 4-6 years. There's an ATSC 3.0 committee planning to consider 4K broadcast... for rollout next decade. Some streaming outlets Netflix claim they'll do 4K, but Netflix is claiming 15Mb/s, and even a sustained 15Mb/s will require many if not most broadband users to upgrade to a faster system without monthly data caps.
4K itself may not be doomed, but this jump to 4K today is more premature than the jump to analog HDTV was in the late 1990s. Maybe it merges with the mainstream enough to ensure every higher-end TV is a 4K TV at some point... PC users could push this, given that TV and computer panels are essentially the same thing. But it might also just flop. There's only so much consumer tolerance for such compressed upgrade cycles... even this time, I'm sticking it out for all the standards to be in place before I jump. Except maybe on that camera. 4K shooting would be useful even for 2K delivery.
Not so pointless. Yes, you do need a large TV for 4K to be worthwhile. My current HDTV is 70", I'd benefit from an 85" 4K television in the same media room. But most people by 32-40" televisions... the format could certainly suffer the way high definition audio did, just not enough people interested to hit consumer saturation.
Steaming, or at least net-based downloading is certainly possible today. Red's Red-ray player is using some new CODEC (possibly eyeIOs or something home grown) at only 20 Mb/s. Sony's doing something similar with their HDD-based player. Netflix (certainly not a leader on picture quality) claims they're good with 4K at 15Mb/s. ISPs may render these problematic with monthly download caps, but the technology is certainly there. Yes, it'll look even better on disc. Disc looks better for HD than streaming, broadcast, or cable/satellite. That didn't make non-disc formats pointless.
It's not a replacement, it's augmenting it. The ATSC 3.0 committee is discussing 4K. I wouldn't hold my breath; it took six years just to decide analog vs. digital for ATSC 1.0
The first HDTVs were ATSC compatible, but not ATSC compliant -- no ATSC tuners. Full 1080i60/720p60 compliant, but no tuner built-in. And it's not just one thing... this was the greater HD industry dealing with things like analog YPrPb vs, digital HDMI or whatever.
As for that
I'm on my third large HDTV (65" analog, 71" DLP, 70" LCD-LED) since they were first available. If you bought before digital, you were an early enough adopter to get hosed on that. There is future proofing of a kind... the Sony PS3 was a future-proof Blu-ray player. But very rarely, and even more rarely when a technology is new. It was a foregone conclusion that HDTV was getting digital inputs, they just hadn't been invented yet when the first TVs materialized. And we were going though a huge shakeup in display technology, also moving analog to digital.
Some of that, certainly... Beta was a Sony-only thing, due to their not licensing it. Much as HD-DVD was a Toshiba-only thing, due to their selling it below cost (because Toshiba got money per disc, like a gaming console), making it impossible for other companies to even want to make an HD-DVD player (other than Samsung's brief experimentation with Blu-ray players that could also read HD-DVD).
VHS had a head up on rentals, too... the first VHS players ran 2 hour tapes, Beta only one hour. So rentals didn't make much sense until the second generation Beta, and at that point, running the tape slower, Beta wasn't as good as VHS. And a business like a video rental store really wants to pick just one winner.. they'd rather diversify their shelf-space than have to support multiple formats carrying the same thing.
And the claim is made that the Pornography Industry also helped VHS win. They put porn out on VHS, due to the cheaper licensing deals... porn studios, at least in those days, were all very small. And for the first time, folks could discretely get their freak on, on demand and at home. This was a factor for sure, not certain just how significant.
Actually, both were pretty much established by the content providers. HD-DVD was set up to fail, launched more like a video game console than a disc format, a virtually proprietary Toshiba/Microsoft venture, sold below cost. That actually did resonate with buyers, even the bleeding edge folks. What really decided it was the content people. In January 2008, Warner Bros. announced they were dropping HD-DVD, followed in February by Paramount announcing they were going Blu-ray. Toshiba officially threw in the towel a few weeks later.. Universal announced they were going Blu-ray only the same day. Of course, it wasn't just that. Even though Sony didn't have stand-alone Blu-ray players out in any volume, they had sold 10 million PS3s before the first million HD-DVD players had been sold. Blockbuster (remember when they mattered?) went Blu-ray only summer of 2007, and Wal-Mart and Netflix both went Blu-ray only in February 2008, while Best Buy was only recommending Blu-ray starting then. Lots of dominoes, all falling the same way.
VHS grabbed an early dominance due to a lower price and a two-hour recording time... users could time shift a whole film, not just a prime time TV show. Beta soon offered a 2-hour format, but they had to drop to below VHS quality (slowing the tape speed from 1.5ips to 0.75ips, versus VHS's 1.3ips), particularly after VHS-HQ debuted, which pretty much put VHS on par or better than Beta. And once video rentals drove VCR sales, VHS had an easy win. Yeah, it was horrible quality, but so was broadcast in those days.
And the brain adjusts pretty quickly, learning to ignore the bad stuff unless specifically looking for it. That's also why people accepted the early TiVo, which had terribly artifacty recording, and DVD, despite its faults, and cable/satellite/broadcast digital TV, all of which is overcompressed.
Supposedly the Blu-ray folks have a committee going on 4K discs. And actually, if they rolled this out like 3D, that's not a bad thing. 3D Blu-ray (Profile 5) was actually kind of a substantial change... a 3D player needs a 2x BD drive, versus the 1x drive for all previous profiles. But that's entirely hidden from the customer, and pretty much any 3D disc package also has a standard 2D disc, and probably a DVD and/or digital download, also included. So marketing it that way, as something in the Blu-ray family, has a much better chance of success, IMHO, than launching this whole new disc format.
And storage-wise, it's kind of a no-brainer. Either sticking with 50GB discs and using HEVC (or something better) for 4K compression, or going to the already exising BD-XL standard (up to 100GB on three layers or 128GB on four layers) and sticking with AVC, delivers enough storage for 4K use. I particularly expect this approach because Sony has already announced that the upcoming PS4 can do 4K video. Keep in mind that the PS3 supported every new profile so far announced for Blu-ray... Sony found it pretty handy to have that software-driven BD platform available for their development purposes, and to drive adoption of Blu-ray (when I bought mine, it was one of the cheaper BD players, and in retrospect, the only future-proof model).
Sony's FMP-X1 4K media player is apparently using eyeIO's video CODEC, claimed to have a higher compression efficiency than HEVC, on this player... at comfortable-for-today's-Blu-ray encoding rates. Given the need for new players, that's maybe the most interesting aspect of this. If they're getting quality 4K at the same bitrates as today's AVC-encoded Blu-rays, that suggests the 4K format is exactly just another kind of Blu-ray, in both normal and 3D models, just as we have today. Same disc hardware, same disc manufacturing, etc... just different code and/or electronics. That would really help establish this. Given the rise of streaming media, it's unlikely a stand-alone 4K format could launch today.
It is much harder to find a job than to keep one.
